Michael Penning: I will continue to take interventions and am happy to do so all night if colleagues want to intervene, but it will affect how much I can speak and whether I can respond positively to all the comments, which I hope to do. I will answer this intervention. The consultation does not finish until 6 October, so it would be wrong and improper for me to comment on any of the submissions until then. Just like the first consultation, all the submissions will be published online so that everybody has access to them. That is only right and proper. That is not always the case with consultations that are done around the country, but we said that we would do that and we did it with the initial consultation. The second part is different from the first consultation because it is restricted, which I will come on to, but people will know exactly what the emergency rescue crews are saying and what others are saying.
	One of the first things that was said to me in Liverpool was that people had been arguing about this for years and that they knew they had to modernise. The Public and Commercial Services Union, which was involved in the negotiations long before I became the Minister, said that there were issues to do with pay, retention—which I know has been alluded to—and recruitment. One can see why there are problems with recruitment in some areas, considering that the basic starting salary is about £13,500 a year. That makes it hard to recruit good quality people. As much as we rely on people’s determination to serve their community, they have to pay their mortgages and bills. We said that we would
	look at that. Right at the end of the meeting in Liverpool, one of the senior coastguards stood up and said to me, “We said this should have happened nine years ago.”
	Most of those who responded to the first consultation did not question me about an individual station. They did not say that I was a nasty, horrible person, that I should not be doing this job or that I was only acting for party political reasons. If people look at the changes around the country, they will see that there are no partisan politics involved at all. If anybody wants to raise that point now, they may do so. There is a smirk on the face of the hon. Member for Bridgend (Mrs Moon). If she wants to show me anywhere in the country where I have used party politics, I will give way to her.

Michael Penning: We have eight minutes left, and I have taken many interventions. We would have been a lot further on had I not done so, but that would not have been fair to hon. Members.
	The hon. Gentleman has made many points, and I will answer as many of them as I can. Many of them were made in the consultation process. Although I am unable to answer all the points today, when the consultation is over we will respond. All the points that the hon. Gentleman has made tonight will be part of the consultation.
	I was trying to build a picture of the coastguard around the country and of the people who actually do the job. I have said to Sir Alan Massey, the chief executive of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency, and to my chief coastguards as we have gone around the country that the Government know that 18 is not the figure that should remain and that the figure should be around about eight or nine. That was put to us in submissions from around the country. In Belfast, it was put to me that there should be eight. I asked the Belfast coastguard, which works very closely with the Swansea coastguard co-ordination centre, why it had chosen in its submission to keep Swansea and not Milford Haven. Everybody who was there will know that Belfast said that its submission was based on the cost of closing Swansea compared with the cost of closing Milford Haven.
	To answer one of the points made by the hon. Gentleman, I came back to London and asked for those costs to be analysed. I felt that if we were going to do this right around the country—hon. Members should remember that we had not come to our full conclusions on which stations should stay open and which should close, and whether or not that would mean having part-time, “day manning” stations, or 24-hour stations—I needed to make sure in my own mind, for when I stand before the House and others, that the MCA’s early cost analysis on the choice of Swansea or Milford Haven was right. When the figures came back, I was told that that analysis was not right. I was told that if we were to come out of Swansea completely, it would be a very close fiscal decision between Swansea and Milford Haven.
	We then completed the process, Mr Deputy Speaker—

Michael Penning: Sorry, Mr Speaker. We have known each other for many years, and I am sure you will not take offence. Oh, dear.
	We looked at the main concerns, which included 24-hour stations and local knowledge. In the Secretary of State’s statement, we accepted those two points. We felt that leaving the station open as what I, as an ex-fireman, would call a “day manning” station was not right and we had to come up with a formula that would allow us to come down to the numbers that we needed to come down to while having the national resilience that we were looking for and a maritime operations centre or headquarters that could feed out in major incidents. So we made two decisions. The first was to come down to the key station that stayed open 24 hours a day and to have one MOC, not two, which actually will give us enough money to keep it open 24 hours a day.
	The second decision was obvious. It was obvious to me when we were doing the work that, if we were worried about topography, as I call it, being an ex-fireman, and local knowledge, which was the general concern, we ought to look at the pairs—or the twins or whatever we want to call them—which obviously cover for each other regularly. That is how they have been structured. We did not have national resilience, which is why the coastguard co-ordination centres were paired off. They covered for each other. Some were paired off quite arbitrarily. For instance, Belfast was paired with the Clyde. But they did it and it worked. We decided that, if those were the criteria for pairing, we would take one of the pairs away. They are in the consultation now because initially the proposals did not include Swansea. However, having decided to move one of the pairs, logically we had to consult on Swansea and Milford Haven, as well as Liverpool and Holyhead—Liverpool was in the consultation with Belfast and the plan had been to close Holyhead—the 24-hour centre in northern Scotland and the Western Isles and the single MOC. That was the basis of the consultation now.